Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/595 Thanks!
And hi, my name's Custo
by well,
I'm a technologist and
a researcher, and I work for an
organization, a small NGO called Tactical
Tech based in Berlin, which
primarily works with rights activists,
helping them use
digital technology and information more
effectively and advocacy work.
But I also spend chunks of
my time in India where for
the last few years I've been doing some
research on the current state of Internet
censorship and mass surveillance
that the government and government of
India has been implementing in that
country.
Today, I'm going to be discussing a
specific incident
that happened earlier this year, which
was a censorship order
well, where
censorship order that the government of
India issued, which brought down a
bunch of really popular websites
for several days in the country.
And I'm going to.
Talk about how what
prompted this order, how it was
issued by the government, the Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology
of India, and how the ISPs
reacted to it and implemented these
blocks and what they could
have done differently.
And also some of the research
we did about how these
blocks were implemented
in terms of what technology was used by
the Internet service providers and
how users could
circumvent these specific blocks.
So last
year, around the 17th of December,
there was order
issued, a censorship order issued by
the Ministry of Communications and I.T.,
which asked every single Internet
service provider in the country to block
access to thirty two
websites.
We saw a bunch of websites
going down every now and then
across different ISPs in the country
didn't quite understand what was going on
until the 31st of December, which
was a day after last Congress
when I woke up in a hotel room in Hamburg
to a leaked a copy
of one of the secret order that
was leaked, which revealed
that there was a ban
implemented by the makatea,
which was issued to every single
ISP and asked the ISPs
not to disclose that this order
was issued or what was in that order.
I'm not
not sure how legible that is on the
screen, but basically what they said was
block 32, you are allowed that are listed
in this in
this letter immediately
and that.
No ISP is allowed to actually disclose
the contents of the of this letter
or reproduce the names of the users
in the letter.
This was done using
the Section 69 of the Information
Technology Act, which the
idea is from the year 2000,
but it was amended in 2008
right after the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
And now is this
draconian law which is used by
the government of India
to conduct enormous
amounts of mass surveillance, but also
censorship in the country.
We've had some wins to get rid of
specific sections of this act, one of
which was called
66. A witch
in the face of it existed to prevent
online harassment, but
was, well, mostly used
by politically
powerful politicians to go after
innocent citizens trying to criticize
governance in the country.
Sixty nine is still exists.
Unfortunately, it something that gives
them a lot of control over
being able to
block any any Internet resource
without having to go
to the courts. And this is what was used.
And what this does not
state, however, is that these orders have
to be secret.
That was something that they
said in that order and then said that
any ISP who
who refused to keep their
order secret could be,
well, they could take action against
them.
Now, what were
what was the reason?
This is something we learned a little bit
later. The reason that they
sent the secret order out, turns
out, was because the Mumbai police,
the anti-terrorism squad of the Mumbai
police on the 15th of November went to
the Ministry of Communication in India
and said that we found instances
of jihadi propaganda
on by
the national groups, on specific
websites. Therefore, we would like you
to pass an order requesting
ISPs to block access to these
websites.
Some of the others that were affected
were
giving you a second to process that.
Yeah, GitHub, dot com,
Vimeo, dot com pastebin, sourceforge
archive, dot org, among others.
Turns out they found
some objectionable content on gift, dot,
github, dot com and on pastebin
dot com, which prompted them to
say block these.
We have no idea why Vimeo was blocked.
Something that I find disturbing and
hilarious at the same time was
SourceForge specifically
URL that was that was blocked on.
SourceForge was an open source project,
which was a clone of
Pastebin.
So they were not blocking content in this
case. They were actually blocking access
to open source code, which they did
not want people to download.
That's the complete blocked list.
Probably not very legible again, but
it's, um, it's mostly
Bassman and similar services.
It also has some free web hosting
services which are blocked
and popular media services
such as Vimeo dot com and Dailymotion dot
com and archive dot dot org,
which is basically the largest Internet
archive on the Internet.
Um.
So, yeah, this was
New Year's Eve, I was at a party
with a few friends, a
bunch of geeks like
we do on New Year's, hang out with our
friends.
And I started talking to a few people.
A couple of them are in this room right
now. And we thought
maybe a maybe a good idea to
conduct some investigation about
how these blocks are being implemented
and how people could circumvent these
blocks.
So between the first and the third of
January, we spent
several hours.
I'm trying to collect
sensitive measurements across
multiple ISPs in India.
We were able to do this across seven
different ISPs, including the state
run Monagle Telecom
Ltd, which is one of the largest ISPs
in India, and Tata Communications, again,
one of the larger Internet service
providers in the country and.
We realized, well, the block orders
said the
specified what to block, but did not
actually say how
this block should be implemented, not
surprised about that.
And unsurprisingly, this led to different
ISPs using various
different techniques to
block these who are in some
cases the same ISP was using different
techniques
to implement this block, implement these
blogs.
And we collected
this we collected this data
over a period of a few days
and realized that there were multiple
different techniques being used.
And the most common
ways we found were either were
empty and in this case was using a
combination of DNS hijacking.
But basically they
and their name, a
name resolvers just
point you to a different IP and not the
IP address of the actual horse that
you're requesting.
In some cases, they were basically
blocking any access, any direct access
to the IP or the host requested.
In some scenarios, they were only
blocking waters,
therefore you could just access something
that was blocked by going to the steps,
the secure version of
that website, the most invasive
method that was being used
definitely by Tata Communications and a
few others was deep packet
inspection, which basically, which is an
ISP actively dissecting
our users traffic
and
denying access to any unauthorized
content.
Hmm.
We used a few different ways
to try and collect this data.
One of the ways was to use a
popular open source
censorship measurement tool kit called
Open Observatory Network Interference.
Um, and we
also relied on a lot of friends who were
in India. We were all in Berlin.
We did not actually have
we were not we did not actually have
access to machines connected to
networks in India. So we remember
waking up a bunch of friends in the
middle of the night going, hey, what's
going on? If you try to access this, can
you tell us what's going on? Can you try
and run these tests for us?
And some people actually did stay
up really late at night in India and
helped us to this, which was great.
We also did well,
actually.
Well, I mean, I say
with a lot of a to people
who were very, very helpful doing this
for a leaf rigor and Adam Gibson
were right here in this room.
And I didn't happen to be one of one of
the developers of the uni project.
And thanks.
So.
We document all of this in a couple of
articles which I
have linked to in a later slide, if you
want to read more about the specific
forms of
techniques used by the ISPs and how
we could circumvent
these bans and,
yeah, to circumvent them.
Like I said, some people, some ISPs are
only blocking SCDP
versions of the website.
And we just
we were just able to get to them using
the ETPs version.
Irrespective of that, I highly recommend
that everyone just use HTP as everywhere
in their Web browsers at all times, which
is a plugin developed by EFH
and for a lot of websites
will present you with an e-book version
of the website, even if you make a
request to the EDP version.
DNS based DNS hijacking
could be circumvented by just using
a different name server.
There's a lot of public name servers out
there, most popular ones, a lot of
a couple of really popular ones being
the Google's public DNS and open
DNS.
There were a few others and basically any
public DNS, so that was outside of India
helped us circumvent
DNS hijacking.
We realized that at no point were
we not able to access any of these 32
blocked users using
Tor and
or most weapons
virtual private networks that we used
or some proxies.
So it wasn't really very difficult to get
around these blocks.
And
it's just that we had to understand how
different ISPs were doing it and what the
most efficient way of getting
around it was.
And so that's what we
did between the first and third, and we
wrote about it. But since then,
we one of the things that we did was
set up a server in India
where we started collecting reports,
using only and
we've just left that running and we've
been collecting that data
continuously.
And something that I've been starting
to work on
of late is trying to make sense
of all the data that we've collected over
the years and publish it in a sensible
way and maybe visualize it in ways.
And it's we've been
doing this not just for the 32 euros
that were in that censorship order,
but using a couple of different lists,
including those those three do, but also
web developer in India cottagey and
who has been compiling a list
of euros that have
been reported as being censored in
India.
We also have always
welcomed any help that anyone wants to
give us in terms of reporting censorship
or
software developers, technologists who
want to help run
censorship measurement,
using only your other methods
to help us.
So there is an email address out there if
which if you want to get in touch with
us to help us continue these
efforts.
Another thing that I recently
started working on is
turning that website, KIOS LaBrot
into something that could be
a continued effort on measuring
censorship in India and
and publishing all the data there.
So hopefully that'll happen
at some point soon.
Um, just to talk about
what the ISPs could have done slightly
differently here
or what I should do when
they are dealing with censorship orders
issued to them, um,
no ISP actually
informed any of their customers until
that order was leaked to
us that they thought
that they were asked to censor any of
these URLs.
I think every ISP should take this
really seriously.
They should be more transparent about
censorship orders and
and whenever possible, inform
their customers as promptly
as they can that they have received,
um.
In order to block
access to an Internet resource,
also there's especially
in India, there is no law that requires
any Internet service provider to deploy
any kind of invasive technology, such
as
doing DeBacker, such as technology
that helps them do deep packet
inspection, among other things.
Therefore, I would like
all of us to appeal to our Internet
service providers, too, and say
don't deploy unnecessary
invasive technology in your
infrastructure when you don't need to.
That just makes it a lot more
difficult for people to vote for
governments to actually pressure you into
using technology like this to block
access to the Internet and
use legal means as an ISP to
fight for your
customers freedom to access of
information and expression.
A good example we saw earlier
this year was when in the Netherlands,
access for all and they go
went to the courts, proved that a
ban that was issued on the Pirate Bay
two your later in 2012
was not necessary because there was no
proof that them banning
the Pirate Bay actually led to.
Fewer copyright infringement because
people were getting around it.
Therefore, the ISPs, the need to
block it.
But yeah, point here that
they did actually use the legal measures
to fight for the right to
freedom of access of information
for their customers and.
And yeah, I think it's also important
that as consumers, we put more pressure
on the providers
when you see something that is blocked
right to your ISP or call them and say,
hey, this is Block, why tell us
now and
tell us what you're doing about it.
Also, tell them that your
customers are unhappy, that they cannot
access
what they're paying you to access and
and pass that on to the
to the authorities who are asking you to
block block access to these Internet
resources.
I'm.
Some of the
well, I'm
just going to mention some things that
that helped that that
we recommended in the articles we wrote
to people who
were being affected by these blogs and
how they could circumvented the DOT
project.
I think the DOT project is probably one
of my favorite inventions
of our times, and it's probably
the most important tool that's working
towards defending our Internet freedoms
today. So, yeah, just you start all the
time and.
Everybody, security
in a box is a tool kit that
tactical take the organization I work for
developes, which is a set
of tactics and tools that helps users
protect their data and their
communications using various different
tactics and encryption tools, and
has a few sections on how
you can circumvent censorship
or use to how you can
install and use tools such as the dart
browser to stay
anonymous and
and protect your identity
and and be able to circumvent censorship
if you are being affected by it where you
are. And
and I'd like to plug
the here Jeff, who developed
Sleepiest Everywhere, which I mentioned
in the talk earlier, also
have been publishing something called the
Self Surveillance Defense Tool Kit,
which is similar to
the kind of work we do, has some very
useful guides about how you can use
tools to protect your Internet freedoms
are going to slowly
move towards and wrapping this up.
These are the two articles I couldn't fit
the whole you are in there.
I don't know how to use
LibreOffice and press very well.
And so those
are the tiny areas, these slides I will
publish online and tweet about it.
But I guess if you watch the video,
you'll be able to find them too.
But that's not to go that
leave. And Claudio
Glenorie and I wrote in the Huffington
Post right after we
did this research last year.
And also Claudio followed up with an
article in The Globe in Global Voices
where he actually talks about how we
should be asking
our ISPs to defend our freedoms and
what we can do as customers of
these Internet service providers to
make the Internet a better place for
everybody.
And, yeah, that's
how you can find me.
I'm humby on Twitter, and
that's my email address.
Thank you so much.
We have some time for some questions
there, Sunny, please,
forward to the microphone.
So I have a question, so you mentioned
that TARTA can probably use
DPI, right, and
it sounds like they had DPI
deployed before
the order was given out.
So could you speculate on why it was
kind of deployed and maybe it might be in
use?
Well, it's not uncommon
for a Espy's to get orders
which are asking them to block specific
Internet resources in India at all.
In fact, when we were doing this
research, we found a bunch of other lists
that we could throw into the scripts we
were using, including the only stuff.
And we found that there was a lot of
different kind of stuff that was being
censored, most commonly
file sharing websites to prevent piracy,
but also a lot of pornography
and a few other things.
So and
this is not the first time that we've
seen something that
is really popular being blocked in India.
We saw a whole lot
of groups on Yahoo!
Dotcom go down a few years ago
because, again,
the Ministry of Communications and IP
sent out an order to the ISP.
This time not a secret order.
Fortunately for us, therefore, we knew
what was going on, but
they found something that they thought
was inciting violence
in the country and asked every
ISP to block it. So and it's
something that's very common.
The ISPs are dealing with censorship
orders quite often in the country.
Therefore, they have
been investing
in technology that
helps them.
Do you think that they're using DPI
for data collection on their citizens?
Well, I can,
but I would only speculate if I were to
answer that question, therefore, I would
say I am I'm not
certain if they are doing that and we
have no evidence that they are actually
doing that.
Thanks.
Thank you so much.
If there's any question, please forward
to one of the mikes.
Um, two questions.
The first is, does some
national or specialized
media ever
wrote an article about that
censorship happening in India
within India?
And the second is there were a
spike in the usage in
the amount of Tor users in India
after that sense, that
censorship order has been implemented.
To answer the first question.
Yeah, there was there has been there was
massive coverage of the two
really large incidents, one
one of them being this and
the other one I mentioned earlier
when groups told Yahoo!
Dot com
was blocked for, I think over
a week a few years
ago.
And yeah, it has been covered by
by large news media outlets.
It has been reported.
This one was also reported after.
After.
People like us and the Center for
Internet and Society in India made a lot
of noise on Twitter and social media
about these blogs.
I'm sorry for your
second question.
People will ask why.
Um, yeah,
I think we've tried to look into
this right after, and I don't remember
if we saw anything that
maybe does, but I don't think we saw
any.
Remember, we talked about it.
Maybe we didn't pay a lot of attention,
but I think that's something we probably
should actively monitor every time
something like this happens.
And I put that put that
on my checklist to.
There is also a question from
someone from the Internet.
OK, the question is, did the Indian
government or the ISP have any advice
or assistance from external, for example,
meaning foreign companies or agencies
to implement these blocks?
So like the hacking team or
three letter agencies,
we did find evidence of
some invasive deep packet inspection
technology that was so that
was being used by data
by a company called Sify
Connect.
I cannot remember where they were from,
but I am pretty certain that they were
not Indian.
And actually, if you read the
Huffington Post article that I linked to
earlier, we have all the
different blog pages that we
saw across different ISPs and they
varied. And one of them is
actually a big advertisement for
the company that was selling
technology to the
ISP that was using,
using, using their tech
to connect this block.
And the second question is about which
private networks are there any little
private networks provided that, uh,
providers that were not affected by these
requests?
So we weren't
able to do a lot of testing
with virtual private networks in India.
We.
Did you ever notice so
yeah, I don't know the answer to that
question is I am I don't
know. I'm not certain.
We did, however, notice that the
blogs very extremely inconsistent.
We were able to access certain things
on specific ISPs at times,
which subsequently were
blocked using the same network connection
at some ISP.
We're not blocking all 32 items.
We were able to access a
specific set of those 32 euro zone, some
ISPs at all times
with no interruptions.
So, yeah, but
we did not actually get around to testing
using weapons in India.
We have a question.
I was wondering, in the light of your
talk, when you're thinking of the latest
revelations with the free basics,
yeah, you're probably expecting this.
What am I expecting?
No, no, no. I thought you expected a
question about OK.
I was just wondering what I think about
what's happening with.
So this is something that we've been
fighting with
the government and the Telecom
Regulatory Authority of India with for
a little while now. For over a year.
They put out a
basically a consultation call
about a year ago asking people
to respond.
And as an
organization, civil society organizations
in India, among others, actually
responded, saying, no, we do not want
Internet dot org, as it was known then
adopted by any ISP in India.
And and now there is a second call
by the PRC, which
is a follow up to that first consultation
call, where
it's pretty much the same thing.
Basically, there is
there was something that there was a
judgment like a week ago
which basically asks Reliance
Communications, which is actually the
only only telecom service provider
which has partnered with Facebook
to provide free basics in India and ask
them to temporarily
suspend the
suspend the service to all their users.
So that is a good sign.
And we will hopefully
have some good news
at the end of this process after this
consultation
comes to, well, a conclusion
from the.
Thank you so much.
I think if there is no further
questions, we will conclude this
very interesting talk.
Thank you. Thank you again.